ORIGINAL ARTICLE The Powerful Male Hero: A Content Analysis of Gender Representation in Posters for Children’s Animated Movies Melinda Aley 1 & Lindsay Hahn 2 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract Findings across a wide body of research suggest that media targeted at young audiences often portray characters according to stereotypical gender roles. Childhood is a particularly sensitive time in gender identity development, and logic from social cognitive theory suggests that repeatedly observing these stereotypes can have a lasting influence on young audiences’ world- view. Building on previous research investigating gender role displays in film content, and with the expectation that content creators use movie posters to convey a one-shot summary of films to audiences, we conducted a content analysis on the gendered power depictions of the main characters in movie posters of 152 popular U.S. animated children’ s feature films produced over the last 80 years. Findings revealed that main characters were more likely to be male and that males were portrayed as more powerful. These results add to a growing, yet substantial, body of research illustrating the prevalence of stereotypical gender role portrayals across virtually every popular medium with which children come into contact. We discuss our results’ implications for potential short-term and long-term effects of exposure to films’ gender role stereotypes on young viewers’ real-life gender role expectations. Keywords Content analysis . children’ s movies . Gender roles . Gender identity . Socialization At a young age, children begin to develop their gender iden- tities as well as expectations about how different genders should behave in society. By the time they enter elementary school, most children’ s gender identities are well-developed (Levy et al. 1998). A child’ s gender role identity is closely tied to their self-perception because it influences how adults and peers interact with them. Repeated interactions with and ob- servations of others can shape children’ s expectations of the “proper” way in which one should behave based on their gender. Importantly, the interactions and observations thought to shape children’ s gender identities and role expectations include both those they witness in the real world and those they view in mass media (Berryman-Fink et al. 1993; Larson 2001). Previous research by Goffman (1976, 1979) has sug- gested that mass media representations often reflect a larger societal expectation of gender roles and that exposure to these representations can reinforce gender stereotypes in viewers. Logic from social cognitive theory (SCT) suggests that repeatedly observing social behaviors can have a major influ- ence on an individual’ s understanding about the social world (Bandura 1977, 2002). Scholars expect the effect of social observations to be particularly influential during developmen- tal years because children are still learning how to attend to, store, and replicate the behaviors and values they witness in media (Barr and Hayne 1999). Due to this sensitive period of development, investigating the content of children’ s media is an essential first step to understanding media’ s socializing influence on the development of gender role identities as well as gender stereotypes. Children and media scholars have ex- amined the gender role stereotypes present in advertising targeted at children (Bakir and Palan 2010; Browne 1998; Larson 2001; Matthes et al. 2016) as well as several types of children’ s entertainment media including books (Hamilton et al. 2006; Kortenhaus and Demarest 1993), television Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-020-01127-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Melinda Aley aleymeli@msu.edu 1 Department of Communication, Michigan State University, 404 Wilson Road, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA 2 Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA Sex Roles https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-020-01127-z